A refreshing release well worth the wait.
Mike Badger returns with his first studio album in almost a decade. Founder member of The La’s, Badger quit the band before they shot to stardom with the top 20 single ‘There She Goes’. Since then, he’s turned his considerable skills to sculpture, producing album art and videos, and co-founding Liverpool-based Viper Records. It’s all chronicled in his entertaining autobiography “The Rythm & The Tide (Liverpool, the La’s And Ever After)”.
His latest offering, produced by son Ray, gives us 14 mainly upbeat tracks which confirm that he’s not a man for the mainstream. That said, there is plenty to admire here. The opening ‘Ghost in the Machine’ is jangling pop at its best, ‘Wolfman’ is raw psycho rockabilly which deserves to be cranked up to maximum volume. If there’s one track that sums Badger up, it has to be ‘Shoot Me in the Head (if I ever become one of them)’, a driving piece of country blues reminiscent of Nick Lowe at his best. ‘How the Hell It Come To This?’ Is a rock and roll history in itself delivered in 1950s Elvis style over a driving acoustic beat, which has him looking nostalgically back to a bygone era when we had “Electric Guitars, and rose red lips driving cars looked like rocky chips, Presley, Monroe, Bogart and Dean.”
Badger says, “I wanted to get right back where it all began, whilst keeping it fresh and contemporary.” There’s no better example of that than the first single ‘Keep ‘em Busy (so they don’t look up)’ which flies along propelled by bursts of pure Yakety Sax provided by the Jazzophonists Cian Radcliffe. The title track ‘Devils Ghosts & Firearms’ finishes things off with a thumping piece of rockabilly which draws on Johnny Cash and would make the perfect soundtrack for a Netflix series about the seedier side of the wild west. All in all, this is a refreshing release that sets Badger aside as one of music’s endearing characters and long may it remain so.
